Sociabilidade operária : as influências do trabalho industrial na perspectiva de gênero.

Abstract

In a globalized and productive restructuring scenario, we witness a reduction of job positions, a reduction in job quality, the growth of informality and the flexibilization of labor relations. The transformations derived from this process affect all the workers, from all walks of life, weakening their social links. The combination of transformations in the productive field (chances to reproduce the capitalistic mode, broadening the accumulation process) and a subaltern gender condition (patriarchal vision of the world and history) potentiate the effects of the adverse conditions. This research has sought to discover how remarkably these changes affect workers women. In a picture of great embarrassment for the workforce, notably industrial-female, the research aims to evaluate how these assembly line workers women of four non-tobacco industries of Santa Cruz do Sul, perceive and describe their sociability beyond the reproductive processes of the domestic and factory work and the influences of an industrial work marked by restrictive characteristics. It is a qualitative research whose method includes a critical discourse analysis and collected data through interviews and focal groups. The results point to the fact that there are no women-focused projects at the companies, except those related to prospective mothers. They also show the poor associative standard of workers women, where the participation is restricted to monthly attendance at church services or religious groups, and occasionally meetings at children’s school associations. It is clear that the everyday life of the workers women is baptized by working time structure, which imprints its marks in the time spent together and in the several forms of social participation. This is due to the fact that persistent and rising admissions have resulted into demographic alterations and changes in schooling, family structure and redefinition of the social role of women, without altering the female condition of responsibility for the domestic and family chores. A condition that, at the labor market, keeps the women distant from the minimum sociability necessary for higher levels of autonomy, restricting their relations to their families, thus limiting social reproduction. This results into the absence of women in the public scenario and the consequent inequality of access to resources like time, power and income.